Examines the development of chemistry in Britain 1760-1820 and relates it to civic life.

This book offers the first comparative account of the changes and stabilities of public perceptions of science within the US, France, China, Japan, and across Europe over the past few decades. The contributors address the influence of cultural factors; the question of science and religion and its influence on particular developments (e.g. stem cell research); and the demarcation of science from non-science as well as issues including the ‘incommensurability’ versus ‘cognitive polyphasia’ and the cognitive (in)tolerance of different systems of knowledge.

In this book, Michael R. Lynn analyzes the popularization of science in Enlightenment France. He examines the content of popular science, the methods of dissemination, the status of the popularizers and the audience, and the settings for dissemination and appropriation. Lynn introduces individuals like Jean-Antoine Nollet, who made a career out of applying electric shocks to people, and Perrin, who used his talented dog to lure customers to his physics show. He also examines scientifically oriented clubs like Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier's Musée de Monsieur which provided locations for people interested in science.

Communicating science and technology is a high priority of many research and policy institutions, a concern of many other private and public bodies, and an established subject of training and education. In the past few decades, the field has developed and expanded significantly, both in terms of professional practice, and in terms of research and reflection. At the same time, particularly in recent years, interactions between science and society have become a topic of heated public and political debates, touching issues like quality and credibility of information, trust in science and scientific actors and institutions and the roles of experts in crises and emergencies. This book provides a state-of-the-art review of this fast-growing and increasingly important area, through an examination of research done on the main actors, issues and arenas involved. The third edition of the Handbook brings the reviews up-to-date and deepens the analysis. As well as substantial re-working of many chapters, it includes four new chapters addressing enduring themes (science publics, science-media theories), recent trends (art-science interactions) and new proposed insights on science communication as culture and as 'the social conversation around science'. New contributors are added to the group of leading scholars in the field featured in the previous editions. The Handbook is a student-friendly resource, but its scope and expert contributions will equally appeal to practitioners and professionals in science communication. Combining the perspectives of different disciplines and of different geographical and cultural contexts, this original text provides an interdisciplinary as well as a global approach to public communication of science and technology. It is a valuable resource, notably an indispensable guide to the published work in the field, for students, researchers, educators and professionals in science communication, media and journalism studies, sociology, history of science, and science and technology studies. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Dale H. Porter has combined recent research by local Cornish historians with his own investigations of nineteenth-century London politics and society to reconstruct Goldsworthy Gurney's remarkable life.

Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums engages the highly problematic and increasingly important issue of museums, science centres, their roles in contemporary societies, their engagement with “hot” topics and their part in wider conversations in a networked public culture. Hot topics such as homosexuality, sexual, and racial violence, massacres, drugs, terrorism, GMO foods, H1M1 (swine flu) and climate change are now all part of museological culture. The authors in this collection situate cultural institutions in an increasingly interconnected, complex, globalising and uncertain world and engage the why and how institutions might form part of, activate conversations and action through discussions that theorise institutions in new ways to the very practical means in which institutions might engage their constituencies.

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight surveys the cultural history of Los Angeles in the decades between 1940 and 1970, illustrating how a regional pattern of decentralized urbanization gave shape to a new "white" suburban identity.